How Long Is Eternity?
by TrekInTandem
Summary: We thought we'd sometimes seen Xena in a time before Gabrielle entered her life (a time, oh, ten years ago), but true soul mates can never be separated. What if Gabrielle was always with Xena, even when she was a warlord? The ancient Greek concept of daimons offers a unique way to explore that possibility. Full summary inside. Chapters set in S3&S6 too. Final chap added 6.17.14.
1. Part I: Daimon

_**Disclaimer & Author's Note: **_I don't own _XWP, _and I'm not profiting from this story-you know the drill. This story is rated M for "suggestive adult themes," mostly in Part III but also a bit in Part I, where there is also some reported violence and "coarse language" of the sort you'd expect around the warlord Xena. Alas, Part III has been slightly edited to fit within that M rating and meet 's guidelines. However, if you are an X/G fan over the age of 18, you will find it easy to read between the lines-I know you're good at _that_-and fill in what's left unwritten.

**-x-**

_**Summary: **_What happens to the soul-mates theme if we assume that a soul _chooses _to live a specific mortal life in order to gain a particular life experience? What if one soul mate does not choose a mortal life but the two will not be parted?

_-x-  
__. . . t__he day came when her reputation preceded her and the men she sensed lying in wait stayed where they lay as she passed. . . . Soon enough, others sought to join her, to ally themselves to the certain sword, the unbeaten warrior (and to her rapidly filling purse) . . .  
__-x-_

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__. . . and no matter how many bodies piled up around her or how much blood she waded through, she always left the field victorious at the end of the day. . . . She no longer cared whom she fought, as long as she could fight, and the growing numbers of men riding under her banner required coin for their upkeep after all . . .  
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. . . and as the days passed, she begin to think she would feel better on the sea . . ._

_She thought she would be safer. And I—I thought so too._  
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**Part I **answers those questions and also provides the untold story, as experienced by Gabrielle, of Xena's life between Cortese's attack on Amphipolis and her fateful meeting with Caesar in the "Destiny" flashback: it tells of what she did when she fled her mother's scorn, of how she became a warlord, of her relationship with (and parting from) her fiance Petracles, of her eventual taking to the seas, and of an experience you never knew she had during her first journey, wounded and anguished, to Mt. Nestos.

_-x-_  
_"It is my choice, and I have chosen." _

_"Yes. You have chosen. It is your _destiny_," he snarls, making the words sound like a threat. "So let it be."_

_"So let it be."  
__-x- _

**Part II **is set in S3, providing a glimpse of Xena and Gabrielle's developing relationship as Xena recounts a strange experience she had before she met Gabrielle, only to find that Gabrielle remembers it as if she were there, subtly connecting the _daimon_ storyline of Part I to familiar canon.

_-x-  
"Was this worth it, Gabrielle? Was it worth giving up heaven to touch me like this?" _

_It wasn't heaven I gave up. It was much better than heaven. Complete union with her._

_"Was it worth it, just for this?" _

_"Oh yeah, it was worth it. Just for this, it was worth giving up more than heaven."_

_"Gabri," she whispers as her hand clenches on my forearm . . ._

_"It was worth it just to hear you say my name like that."  
__-x-_

**Part III **picks up at the end of S6's "When Fates Collide" and depicts Xena and Gabrielle reacting to the events of WFC-and to a new knowledge of exactly what _I'll love you forever_ truly means for the two of them-as they acknowledge the truths their recent (and past) actions have embodied.

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_"I destroyed the world for you, remember? It doesn't shock me that you'd crush it under your heel for me."_  
_-x-_

**-x- **

Enjoy and please leave feedback.

**How Long Is Eternity?**

**Part I: Daimon**

"The term 'daimon' means 'divine power,' 'fate' or 'god.'  
[ . . . ]Good daimons were considered to be guardian spirits,  
giving guidance and protection to the ones they watched over."  
– _Encyclopedia Mythica_

"A special being watches over each individual,  
a _daimon_ who has obtained the person at his birth by lot . . ."  
– Walter Burkert, _Greek Religion_, Harvard UP

_Daimôn  
_2. the power controlling the destiny of individuals: hence, one's lot or for[t]une  
- _A Greek-English Lexicon_, Oxford UP

Though I have been with her always, she has no name for me, for she does not know that I am here. Nor have I a name for myself. I have never needed one. I know her names for the people of her world, both the ones she uses to address them or to speak of them to others and the ones she uses to herself, in the privacy of her own mind, in that world which we share. I know her every thought; I understand her heart, better sometimes than she herself does. I am of her and yet distinct and have been since she drew her first breath. I know now that I did not begin then, that there was existence before that, but I have forgotten it. It does not trouble me that I cannot remember, for I know that I chose and forgetting was part of the choice.

The others in her world call her Xena, and that is how she thinks of herself. I think of myself, now that I have come to think of myself at all, as Xena's. I am Xena's. If I must have a name, let it be that. Xena's.

And she is mine, mine to watch over, guide, and protect. Mine to love. That too was part of the choice.

She is mine and always has been. I amused her when she was alone and fretful in her cradle, and her tiny hands reached up to grasp my trailing hair, closed on nothing. I stroked her flushed cheeks when she was ill and fevered, and she was soothed as if she felt my touch. She grew, and I held her, for a given value of "held," as she took her first steps, kept her from stumbling when I could, and when I could not, eased the sting of scraped knees and bruised hands with comforting words and funny faces, teasing blue eyes dry and a smile back onto tremulous lips. She grew bigger, and a time came when she could no longer see me. It was enough, then, that she could hear my voice. Then, she learned to talk and when I whispered to her, she no longer heard. But she was there and I was with her, of her, and that was still enough.

She grew into a girl who ran across fields, shouting with laughter, and I ran with her, my laughter just as joyous, the delight in her heart my own. When I whispered caution or advice, sometimes she still listened even though she could no longer hear. Sometimes she didn't, and I knew that was only the way of things, so I was never frustrated, only sad if she got hurt or into trouble. And when she cried silently in the night, heart wounded by her brothers or parents or friends, I curled around her and whispered comfort, and even if she could not hear me, always my presence could ease her pain, and peace came, and with it, sleep.

She grew older and she and her younger brother, Lyceus, taught themselves to wield swords and staged mock battles with their friends in the fields where once they had chased each other. Her older brother, Toris, laughed at them and told her little girls had no business playing soldier, and the first time, it made her cry on the spot—then later, only once we were alone and no one could see—but eventually she stopped crying, and after that, Toris' taunts only made her grim-faced and determined, only made her practice harder.

She grew into a warrior, delighting in the feats her body could perform at her command, and I delighted too, for her joy was my joy. The day came when she always won when she fought Lyceus and their friends, and soon, only Lyceus didn't care. Lyceus thought she was amazing and only admired her more each time she trounced him.

She brushed it off when the other boys would no longer play with her, but I felt what she felt. It hurt, but she had Lyceus, and I was there to soothe and comfort, even if she didn't know, and I had her, so all was well.

Then Cortese came. Lyceus died. Her mother broke her broken heart again. Her pain was my pain. Her pain was too much my pain; for the first time, when she needed my guidance, I had none to give. How could I urge her to stay when her mother's accusing eyes sliced her into shreds with every glance? How could I urge her to go when everything and everyone we'd ever known was here?

I was silent. We went.

Those first months, she lived—just barely—off the land and off the money she took off bandits who had attacked her on the roads. There was never enough food to fill her but she didn't care. She hunted sometimes and occasionally bought bread and cheese when she found herself in a village, if she remembered the dinars in her pouch, but there were days when she didn't bother to hunt, didn't bother even with bread or dried meat if she had it in her pack. She hardly noticed the gnawing in her belly, cared not when she did feel it; it was nothing to the agony in her heart. In those first days, wandering aimlessly, heading nowhere except always farther from Amphipolis, she lived only out of habit. It went on that way for weeks. Months. Then the day came when the pain and anger inside began to find a focus, when she begin to emerge from the madness of grief and return to something like rational thought. Then, she lived only for finding Cortese, finding him and making him pay.

She ventured back toward Amphipolis for the first time, but never too close, never within two days' travel, and she finally found a lead, then another and another. We tracked down each one. Eventually, she pursued even the vaguest possibility, no matter how far it took her, no matter how remote the chance it would lead to Cortese. But she never found him, never got close to where he'd been or learned where he had gone. It was as if the army of iron-masked soldiers had vanished from the face of the earth, and still she searched, farther and farther now from the valley she'd once called home, though now without any conviction her search would yield fruit.

She grew into a woman, with no one but me to see the last vestiges of childhood fade, as we roamed the countryside, ceaselessly tracking the man who had taken everything. She looked now like the warrior she was; with the return of rational thought and the advent of the quest to find and punish Cortese, she had equipped herself accordingly: armored and armed, she even owned a horse for the first time in her life. She looked like a warrior, but men, especially thugs, can be dense, and the ones who fed themselves by preying on travelers saw a woman and still saw easy prey. Some of the ones who lived must have forgotten the embarrassment of being trounced by a woman when in the depths of their cups, enough so to tell the tale, because the day came when her reputation preceded her and the men she sensed lying in wait stayed where they lay as she passed. Then, when she would venture into a tavern, desultorily seeking information she no longer expected to obtain, the familiar leers were accompanied by more and more looks of wary respect.

Soon enough, others sought to join her, to ally themselves to the certain sword, the unbeaten warrior (and to her rapidly filling purse), or to have a little of the glory that was accumulating around her reflect on them—and in most cases, as she knew, to get her under them in bed . . . or in a pile of leaves or against a tavern wall; they weren't picky. Most of them, to a greater or lesser extent, wanted that. Some of them, as much as they admired her prowess in battle—_because_ they admired it, they wanted to dominate her in the simplest way a man knows of dominating a woman. To prove they were men with one sword, if not with the other. Some of them did want her simply because she was beautiful, and I felt more kindly toward these—and more so toward the ones who were drawn to her because she was unique or charismatic or daring or clever or exciting. She didn't care either way. What did their motivations matter to her?

She let some of those who approached her ride with her, if they showed some bit of cleverness or amused or flattered her in a way that soothed her broken heart for a moment or were simply pleasing to look upon and not too annoying to travel with, and a smaller number, she rode in passion, sometimes for a night before she rode away, sometimes for a season, until inevitably she lost interest—or got what she'd wanted from them. She took even some of the ones who wanted her only because it was the one way they thought they could best her; their motivations didn't matter to her, after all—but she still made damn sure none of her partners ever walked away from her bed feeling smug about having their way with her, even the ones who had less ignoble intentions and wouldn't have been smug at all. She couldn't afford any weakness and allowing that would have been one.

Those who rode with her then were not good men, for the most part, but they were a distraction from the pain clawing at her heart, and for that, I appreciated them. And a few—well, I think a few of them actually loved her. Loved her because she was fierce and beautiful and proud and cocky and unwaveringly loyal to those who rode and fought beside her. For those, I felt something more than mere appreciation. Though she never let anyone close and so none of them ever had the chance to know her in any of the ways I did, they could still see enough of her to love her, and that made them, no matter how distasteful their influence on Xena, lovable to me.

While it was still desire for revenge that kept her going, as time passed, her search for Cortese faded into the background. The men around her gave her the more immediate purpose of filling their bellies and filling their purses with the coin that would let them satisfy less basic needs, and instead of merely fighting off those who attacked her, she and her companions now started the fights. At first, she targeted only ruffians and that ilk—small groups, too—but battle was anesthetizing. She could lose herself in it and cease to feel anything for those glorious moments when the only things that existed were her body and her opponents' and their blades, when her blood sang in her veins, and her heart thrilled at her own strength and skill.

Out of her grief, a deeply simmering rage had emerged, and battle slaked that rage even as it fed it. Because it did, she sought out stronger opponents in greater numbers, and no matter how many bodies piled up around her or how much blood she waded through, she always left the field victorious at the end of the day.

As her reputation grew, more and more men petitioned to ride with her until soon she had a small army around her. She no longer cared whom she fought, as long as she could fight, and the growing numbers of men riding under her banner required coin for their upkeep after all, so now her targets included traveling merchants and the occasional wealthy village.

In those days, I found my voice again, resumed the duty in which I had failed, but now she no longer heeded my guidance, so I contented myself with comforting her when I could, which was not often. Nothing could soothe her heart for long.

No matter how many coins she had in her purse—or in the great chests that trundled along on carts in the rear—or how many men swore their swords to her or fell to her sword, it was never enough. She still felt that the world had spiraled out of control and she couldn't regain her grip. She never felt safe. She feared no man or god because she wouldn't really mind dying, but there were things worse than dying, as she had learned in her last days in Amphipolis, and the only hope of safety from such wounds was to live life like the battle it was, to fight off everyone and everything, until you were the victor simply because you were the last one standing.

Then one of the men she amused herself with became more than a distraction. Sex became more than a way of losing herself, more than a physical outlet. She stopped being so careful to stay in control. Petracles had become her lover.

He said he loved her, and eventually she even began to believe it. For the first time in over a year, her heart hurt a little less. She smiled more often. Sometimes, for a moment, when he rode up beside her bearing freshly picked flowers or held out both hands closed in fists for her to pick, playing a game she had once played with Lyceus, to surprise her with a sweet or a bauble the color of her eyes, she even felt lighthearted. Oh, how I loved Petracles for giving that back to her, even for a moment. She, on the other hand, tried to resist loving him, but in the end, she couldn't help herself, and when he asked her to marry him, she agreed. I begin to imagine a day when she might leave this pointless life, when she could have a home again, have a family again.

For a couple of weeks, she was happier than I had believed she could ever be again. And then Petracles stopped coming to her tent at night, stopped surprising her during the day with little gifts. When she went to him, he was cold, aloof, and finally cruel. He'd changed his mind about marrying her, he said. He didn't love her, and he didn't want to be tied to any one piece of ass for the rest of his life, no matter how good a lay she was. Already, he said, he was getting bored with even her best tricks.

For a moment, I thought Xena was going to kill him. Not since she first saw Lyceus' body had I felt such rage in her heart as rose in her then. Instead, she strode out of his tent, tearing from her arm the bracelet he'd given her to seal their betrothal, and threw the bracelet into the bonfire that most of the men were sitting around.

They were an army now, and by this time, Petracles had been pretty much leading at her side, in her name, but she knew not one man would hesitate if she called for the gauntlet. I agreed; not one of them would dare defy her. My rage was as great as hers—greater in a way—and for a moment, I was disappointed when she reigned hers in. In that moment, as she found composure, she had realized that Petracles had only ever been out to take the army for his own, that all his pretty words and soft touches had been deliberate, that she had let herself be manipulated. Later, I would come to think that it wasn't that simple, that it was not a matter of deliberate manipulation from the start, that Petracles was just himself too battered by the world to be capable of loving her as she deserved, but at the time, I was too awash in her feelings to think my own thoughts. And neither of us was ever sure why she _didn't_ demand the gauntlet.

Even without her order, having seen her cast the bracelet into the fire, knowing Petracles was out of favor and eager as always to please her, some of those most fiercely loyal to her had risen, drawing their swords, and were taking the first step toward Petracles' tent. She stopped them with a raised palm and I saw one shiver as he met her eyes. I knew they must be ice.

"Petracles is leaving us tonight," she said, her voice easily carrying around the camp. "We've both recovered our senses and remembered that even the best fuck is no cause for a life of bondage." She rubbed her now bare wrist with the fingers of the other hand and the men laughed heartily, some of them calling out remarks along the lines that it was good she'd come to her senses in time, all of them thinking she meant herself when she said _we _and was allowing Petracles to save face, though of course, she was saving her own.

"Especially—" she added, teasingly, her eyes lighting for a moment on a handsome young one she'd been thinking of bedding before Petracles had become the only guest in her bed, "when there are so _many_ pretty stallions to ride." More guffaws. I knew that even her eyes told her lie now. They would be warm and merry and twinkling with bawdy good humor.

She began to thread her way among them, toward the one who'd caught her eye, as she continued. "But while I may be in need of a new mount—" She paused to let the laughter and whoops die down. "Petracles is still our friend, so he will go in peace, and if any of you are so inclined, you may go with him with my blessing." She reached her target and circled him, purring, flattering them all, "After all, there are now too many stallions in this stable for even _me_ to ride." Over catcalls and lewd denials, she called out, "And Greece is big enough for our force to become two forces and still live richly, so I release from his oath any man who would seek his fortune with our friend Petracles, and I give you my vow that those I ride—" More whoops. She smiled, leered really, as she waited for the noise to subside. "—and those who ride with me—will only ever greet those who ride with Petracles as friends."

The men cheered, gathering around her, drawn to her as always, and Xena turned her smile on all of them before shouting them down. "Enough! You'll have to go back to entertaining yourselves now because I've a very full stable to break, don't I, and dawn is mere hours away!" She hooked her fingers in the belt of the goofily grinning young man at her side and started for her tent. Halfway through the mass of her men, she paused and turned back.

"I think I can get through more than one before sunup." The men roared their approval and her eyes settled on another comely face. "You come too." She began to turn and then turned back and pointed to another of them. "You too." With the roar of her troops ringing in her ears, she led her new toys back to her tent and lost herself for the rest of the night in her second favorite kind of conquest. And if her heart was newly bloodied and raw and being walled off as quickly as she could manage it, her body, as always, did not fail her.

In the morning, Petracles was gone—glad to have escaped with his life, she thought, and if he'd seen in her eyes the rage I felt in her, he was indeed glad of that—and a dozen or so of the men with him. Xena went back to warring and raiding and tried not to feel anything at all, except the thrill of the fight and whatever fleeting pleasure the parade of men she took to her bed could give her.

In those days, they had come near to the shore, and as the days passed, she begin to think she would feel better on the sea, with only a few companions around her, a crew who could be trusted, at least so far as to take orders, none of whom she was in danger of loving.

She thought she would be safer. And I—I thought so too.

By then, she had made it so that no one in the region would dare to attack Amphipolis because everyone knew it had been an attack on the village of Amphipolis that had unleashed the infamous Xena on the land. She knew she would be just as much a deterrent on the sea because no warlord or greedy city leader who might consider targeting Amphipolis would doubt that she'd be on land with an entire army at her back ready to meet him in battle before he could get his army within a day's ride of the village, and she would be careful to make sure no one forgot it by occasionally sending small raiding parties to loot those who had once been—or who had the potential to become—enemies of Amphipolis.

Eventually, there was enough money to provide a sizable final pay-out to every man in her army and still have enough left over for such a change. She bought a ship. She raised a crew. She became a pirate. A few of those who'd ridden with her for the past year and had a taste for something new—or as I suspected was the case with some of them, who weren't willing to see the most wondrous thing they've ever known stride out of their lives—came with her.

She liked the sea. The ship was her world, and she could control the ship. We thought it safer. And then there was M'Lila and Caesar, and she loved them both. Again, there was blood and betrayal. There was the cross.

Now there is agony.

M'Lila drags her, has been dragging her for hours—days—away from that beach where Caesar left her to die. Her heart is broken. Her legs are broken. When she is awake, every fiber of her being, physical and spiritual, is one unending scream of anguish, even when she is silent. I can barely separate myself from that anguish enough to wish she would find some escape in unconsciousness again. When she does, my whole being is one unending plea to comfort her, soothe her, ease her pain. I will it as I have never willed anything before, not even when I willed her to follow my advice when I was most worried for her, most weary of the killing of the battlefield.

Agony lances through me—through her—again and her eyes fly open. But this is different. Her eyes are still glazed with pain but they are focused. They are focused on me. I feel a flutter in my chest as my heart races. Surprise. Shock. Elation. She sees me. I have a chest! I have a heart! I am corporeal! She sees me! She sees me as she has not since she was an infant . . . and more, because then I may have had a form to her eyes but I had no substance, yet now I can feel my own body.

Lips parting in—what? Is it awe? I should know but I don't because I am separate—she lifts a trembling hand, weakly; after only seconds, it drops back to her belly.

I grab it. I close fingers around her palm. I stare at her hand in mine. I can feel her. I can see a smaller hand that belongs to me wrapped around her larger one. Mine is the color of cream and is perfect, without blemish. Hers is tanned under the dirt and bruises, the skin chapped from the cold, the nails broken, imbedded with dirt and blood, and tinged blue along the ragged skin at the bases. She makes a sound and I tear my eyes (actual eyes, watering in the cold wind) from our hands to look back to her face. She is trying to speak. I lean closer, and my hair tumbles over my shoulders and around my face. It looks like the same hair she used to reach for from her cradle, but when it falls on her cheek, she feels it; she tries to blink her eyes clear of it. I hurriedly brush it away and then I just keep stroking her face.

"I know you," she mumbles, her voice hardly more than the breath I feel on my cheek. "Who are you?"

I have no name for myself. I have never needed one. I'm Xena's. "I'm yours," I finally reply and my voice is as real as hers.

"What's that mean?" she demands. Her voice is stronger, now, and I realize that she is mastering the pain of her broken legs, and that makes me realize that I no longer feel her pain as I did before. Now that I have a body, I am too separate from her to share in her physical experience.

"I mean I—I'm with you. I watch over you. Guide and protect you."

I am surprised to see humor spark in her eyes, curl her lips just the slightest bit. "You're doing a great job."

The skin of my face goes hot; I'm blushing I realize. "I—I—" I'm trying to say I'm sorry but I'm too mortified to get the words out.

She doesn't notice, has barely paused. "Why?"

"Why?" I repeat, not understanding. Always before I have understood her perfectly.

"Why are you here? Why do you watch over me? Why you? Why me?" she reels off the questions impatiently.

"I chose you," I answer, realizing it as I say it. I didn't just choose, I now know; I chose _her_. And long before I chose this existence, too. We have always been one, she and I.

"Why?" she says again.

The question hardly makes sense to me. It simply could not have been otherwise. "I'm yours," I can only say again, feeling inadequate.

Those piercing eyes that have never left mine since they opened sink shut. It doesn't matter. I am still fascinated by them, by the cool skin of her face under my fingers, the hand that twitches slightly in mine.

She opens her eyes. "I know you," she says as she did when she first opened them, first saw me. "I love you," she adds matter-of-factly, this woman who no longer says those words, who has seen love cause only pain, who will, when she is rational again, vow to forsake it forever. Her eyes close again. "Don't leave me," she mumbles, almost inarticulately, but I understand her.

"I won't," I promise urgently. "I've always been with you. I'll always be with you, even when you can't see me."

"No," she mutters, shifting uncomfortably on the travois M'Lila made. "'s not enough. Have to see you. Feel you." Her head tosses from side to side as she moans, the pain overcoming even her great will.

I squeeze her hand, stroke her hair. "There," I say, desperate that she should feel me as she wants. "There."

But she doesn't. The hand that I held in mine reaches weakly for what is no longer there. She thrashes now, muttering, "No, no. Don't go," and I wrap myself around her as I have always done, a presence, nothing more. She cries, for the first time since she brought Lyceus home to their mother.

And I know what to do, what I can do, what I must do. I have lived in time with her since I became hers, since she drew breath into her mortal body and became mine to guide, since I chose, but I am not bound by time as her mortal body binds her. I can go back. I can choose as she once chose. I will be born. I will grow. I will feel hunger and cry, learn to walk and fall down, grow up, grow old, die. Suffer all the love and desire and anguish of mortal existence. For her. To feel her, to be felt. To live with her and die with her.

If I still had a body, I would put my mouth close to her ear and whisper to her, but I don't. There is nothing to hear when I tell her, "You will see me again. You may have to wait a while, and I know I will have to wait for you, but we will be together. You will feel me. I will be like you."

I choose again.


	2. Part II: Choosing Again

I choose again.

~.~.~.~

I am elsewhere. Outside of time. Memory has returned. I have something like a body, and it is clad in silver. I raise my hands to my face to look at them and wings unfurl from my back. This is the form I wore when last I chose, when I chose to be what Xena would call a daimon, a guardian spirit, bringer of destiny. As a new daimon, from all the cosmos, all of time and space, I chose her. Because it could not be otherwise. Because our souls have always been together, since before time began. My companion chose mortal existence, chose to suffer and learn, and I would not be separated from her, could not be by any force other than our own will, so I became her daimon.

I did not know—could not have known—what it meant to be mortal, to have a physical body, bound by physical laws. Nor did I understand what love was, any more than a fish knows what water is, because it was all we had known; it was our entire existence. But now, through her, I have felt how a soul in a mortal body loves: the body loves, as much as the spirit; the body craves the beloved, longs for union with the beloved, as much as the spirit does.

When last I chose, I could not have known that she, in her body, would need my touch, a physical touch. Mortal body to mortal body.

Now I know.

There is a longing in her, soul and body, that only I, her second soul, can fulfill.

A figure stands before me. He—for his form is male—he, too, is framed by wings, but his are a rich green while I know mine to be white.

"Well, little guardian?" he says in Greek.

Always so patronizing, this one. Does he not realize that I was ancient when he was new made, that I am timeless and of all time?

"I will incarnate," I declare, and my voice is steady if not as resonate as his. He is something other than I, than Xena. He has never had this choice. He can be only what he was made to be. I'm a bit resentful that today that job includes standing witness to my choice, but his master is slowly gaining dominion over the material plane. That is the way of it; gods come and go as belief shapes the cosmos and one simply has to put up with it. "I must be with her, in all ways."

"The life she has chosen is only going to get harder," he warns. "You will suffer."

"Life is suffering," I reply. "Yet she chose life. We cannot be parted. We have always been together—"

"But you did not. You did not choose mortal life when she did. There must have been a reason for that." His prying is almost taunting, as if he thinks he knows the reason, and maybe he's right, but I do not care.

There _was_ a reason, of course. I did not want to suffer; I did not see the value of such suffering, of mortal life in general. The suffering it entailed thus seemed pointless.

I do not have to answer, to assuage his curiosity—or rather his master's—but I decide that I will, in part. "If there was, it has been outweighed." It is the truth, and his master may make of it what he will.

Dismissing that line of conversation, I continue where he interrupted. "We cannot be parted, and now I choose to be with her in the life she has chosen, suffering or no. Besides," I remind him, "I have suffered with her through mortal life already."

He shakes his head, almost sadly. "It is not the same as the merging of souls of daimon and mortal. You will suffer separately if you do this. You in your body, her in hers. You will be two, for the first time since time began. Entirely separate."

He speaks of what he cannot possibly understand. And that he has exceeded his role so far as to question my choice angers me, but I remind myself that this one can only do what he is told; it is his presumptuous master who deserves my ire, not he. My voice is calm when I reply. "Then I will suffer separately, but I will be with her."

"Hmm. For a time, you will, but you will not know her as you know her now. You will not remember."

"I may not remember, but I will know her."

He continues as if I hadn't spoken. "And mortal bodies are fragile. One day, one of you will die and leave that body, and one will be left behind."

The idea of that gives me pause as I contemplate what it might feel like to the human woman who remains. But I will not be swayed. "Not for long," I say.

"Years, perhaps," he retorts. He seems to be angry now, and I suspect that is because he is not managing to accomplish whatever task his master set for him. "You will trade complete union for a brief span of mortal existence, split into two, followed by a time of complete separation upon one of your deaths? For _what_?"

Foolish angel—foolish master. What are mortal years to we who are eternal?

My anger is fiercer now and it is that anger which makes me answer. "So that we may have what she needs now: mortal love, mortal union, the comfort she will take from the touch of my hand. So that I may learn what she is learning and thus continue to be her other half after this life ends, as I have always been."

He turns his face from me, from my anger, and tries another approach. "It is not an easy life that she chose. There will be more blood—much more. And much more pain, for her and anyone near her. There will be brutality of a sort you cannot now imagine. You will not like what she is becoming, especially what she will become while you are separated—"

"She is mine. She is me. I am her. It doesn't matter if I like it. If there will be something I cannot imagine now, I must experience it. A lack of understanding, an inequality of knowledge and experience, must not divide our souls after this lifetime."

He turns back. "In the life she has chosen, one day, you will look upon me not with love as you now look on all—nor even with the reverence mortals have for my kind—but with hate. I will be her enemy, and thus, I will be your enemy."

And so he reveals his master's ever-growing ambitions—and the nature of them. A strategic mistake, and again, not his own.

"Then we will be enemies."

I can see that my unruffled acceptance of such a thing has angered him. Made him too angry even to respond. I press my advantage, realizing I have learned many things already, merely by sharing Xena's life. What more might I learn by living my own at her side? My patience wears thin. I say the words I know must put an end to this pointless discussion no matter how intent he is on continuing it.

"It is my choice, and I have chosen."

"Yes," he allows bitterly, with seeming vindictiveness. I watch his face and see a look cross it that I have seen on many faces through Xena's eyes: it is the bitterness of recognizing inevitable defeat from an unexpected source. But no matter; he says what he must say in response, and I repeat it. I say the words with relish because it feels good to have won and denied this one's master what he desires, even if the victory was always mine as my choice was already made and not to be overturned by such creatures as these. That pleasure too I have learned from Xena.

"You have chosen. It is your destiny," he snarls, making the words sound like a threat. "So let it be."

"So let it be."

Unusually, it's not yet dawn when I wake. I rarely wake on my own before day is breaking. Even more unusual—today I am the first one awake. The air is cool, but I'm warm and toasty, sprawled as I am under the furs and atop Xena. My head is tucked under her chin, my arms (rather numb) are wrapped around her, hands tucked beneath her shoulders, and my pelvis rests between her legs, which are entangled with mine. I fell asleep on top of her after we made love, it seems, and neither of us moved all night. I lift my head and her eyes snap open as if she had never been asleep. They are so blue, so blue and so beautiful; it doesn't matter that there is not yet enough light to distinguish color. She smiles. "I know you," she says playfully. "Hey, you." Her hands slide over my back and then she wraps her arms around me. "I love you."

I snuggle into her arms, nuzzle my face into her neck. "I love you too," I say, her skin against my mouth muffling the words.

She's gone still and tense and I lift my head to see her face. "What?"

She looks puzzled but she also has that look she gets when she's figuring something out. "It's just . . . I just remembered something."

"What?"

"Saying that before . . ."

I smile cheekily. "Yeah, I think you said it a few times last night." I can feel my smile soften, my whole face. "And yesterday—and every day for the last few moons."

She gives me that smile now, that full-on beaming smile that shows her teeth and makes her look like the softest, sweetest woman in the world instead of the deadly warrior she is. Well, she may be deadly, but she is soft and sweet, too—for me, anyway, only for me. She squeezes me in a hug and lifts her head to kiss me. "And I'll keep telling you I love you every day that I draw breath for the rest of my life," she vows when our lips part, entirely serious.

See? With me, she is the sweetest woman in the world. I thank the gods I'm the one who gets this Xena.

"But that's not what I meant," she adds. "It was the other part, that I know you."

"Okaay . . ." I'm just letting her know I'm listening as I wait for more.

"I'd forgotten all about that until just now." I feel the muscles in her stomach tighten and I know she wants to sit up, so I roll onto my side and prop myself up on my elbow. She rises, oblivious to the chill in the air, turns to me, and folds her legs in front of her. "It was a long time ago. Before we met. I was hurt—it was . . ."

I see the pain of the memory in the lines of her face and I put my hand on her leg. She takes it in both her own. "Caesar had broken my legs," she says, matter-of-factly, and I know what it costs her to keep her voice so even when she says his name. "M'Lila was taking me to Nicklio, and I was pretty out of it. Fever, I guess. But there was this woman. I don't know where she came from or where she went, but I saw her clear as day, and I knew her, so that's what I said when I saw her. 'I know you.'"

I'm shaking my head. "No, no, you said that to me. I remember that. You were hurt. God, it was bad, and . . ." I stop, realizing I can't remember when this happened. "But when was that?"

She's looking at me strangely. "It wasn't you, Gabrielle. We hadn't even met yet. You would have been hardly more than a child."

I sit up. "Xena, I remember it. I just . . . can't . . . quite . . ." When the hades HAD that happened? Xena seriously wounded? That never happens! The only time I had been really scared for her, other than the time _I _dragged her up that damn mountain to Nicklio, was that time with the poison dart . . .

"Gabrielle, I think I know when it happened. It's my memory after all! I was lying on this travois M'Lila had rigged and she was taking me up Mount Nestus, though I didn't know it then. I woke up and the woman was there, right on top of me, like you were when I woke up just now."

I'm nodding. "I held your hand and you tried to say something, so I leaned closer, but my hair got in your face . . ."

Her eyes are wide and her lips are parted in surprise. I've rarely seen her look so shocked. "How could you know that?" she whispers.

"Because I was there!" I say, annoyed now, with her for insisting it was someone else, with myself for not remembering when this happened. "I got my hair out of your face, and you said, 'I know you.' I just remembered when you brought it up. Then you said, 'Who are you?' It must have been when I took you to Nicklio."

Xena looks seriously baffled now. "I did say that, but Gabrielle . . ."

"And I said . . . I said, 'I'm yours' . . . Xena . . . Xena, I remember it, but that . . . that never happened!"

"No, it didn't," she says, "or rather it did, but it happened to me while you were still telling stories to your dolls in Potidaea."

I cross my arms, a bit defiantly. "All right then. Then who was this woman who told you she was yours, hm? How did I know what she told you?"

"I—I don't know."

"You said you knew her."

There's a pause. Then: "I did."

"Well?" I demand.

She's staring at me like she's memorizing my face. When she finally speaks, her voice is soft, and it takes me off guard. "But it _couldn't_ have been you, Gabrielle."

I throw my hands up, more out of frustration that I can't place that particular moment than annoyance with her.

"Gabrielle, think about it. It couldn't have happened while you were taking me to Nicklio because I never regained consciousness the whole way. I mean, I could have forgotten, messed up as I was, but that's what you said, right? You told me you were so scared and kept hoping I'd wake up, so things wouldn't seem so bad, so you could believe I was getting better, so I could tell you what to do for me, but I never woke up once. It couldn't have been any other time since we've known each other either. I haven't been out of it like that any other time. That time with the dart was bad, but I never lost touch with reality, so why would I have been asking you who you were?"

"Well . . . well, okay, but look, if you knew this woman, why would you have been asking _her_ that anyway?"

"I didn't know her. I mean, yeah, I _knew _her, but I didn't know her."

"Xena, you're not making any sense."

She sighs. She studies her hands for a moment, lost in thought, and then she looks up at me and takes my hands. "Gabrielle, I knew her like I knew you when I saw you in the woods outside Potidaea that day. I knew her like . . ." She searches for words.

"Like the other half of your heart," I say, because I too am remembering that day when I first laid eyes on her and knew I belonged with her. I gaze into her blue eyes—and it is light enough now that I can see they're blue.

She's gazing back at me and I've mostly forgotten the conversation we were having before. It's one of those moments when the world drops away around us and the only thing that exists is she and I.

"Maybe it _was_ you," she says. One of her hands tucks my hair behind my ear and then cups my cheek. She leans in. "Must have been." I lean in, drawn to her as naturally as breathing. "You're the only other half of my heart," she says with her mouth against mine.

Sweetest woman in the world.

No one would ever believe it, I think vaguely, as I pull her into my arms and down onto the blankets. But, then, I like having it for our little secret.


	3. EverythingHappens Precisely as It Should

I'm riding with my arms wrapped around her waist as I have so many times before. It's as familiar to me as anything, but a few moments ago, I was another person in another place. She was dying on a cross that should have been mine and the world was ending. In more ways than one.

I don't want to think about it. I just want to feel the wind rushing past as she urges Argo into a gallop, her hair blowing into mine, tickling the side of my face, which I have pressed against her back. I just want to feel the leather under my hands and the heat of her body through it.

I don't want to think about it, but I can't stop seeing her in that dungeon before they dragged her away from me.

"I'll love you forever," she said.

"My destiny was linked to Caesar and that cross," she said, "and I hated them both."

Yes, that cross. I can see it. Not the one they nailed her to so her blood mixed with the rain pounding down on her bare skin, pounding on my head and back as I rode away from her. The one she spoke of. The one Caesar hung her on when he broke her legs and shattered her last measure of trust for other people. Not only can I see it, I can feel it.

I felt the blow that day, felt the bones splinter, felt the anguish in her heart that was so much worse than the torment of her body. I felt it. I saw it. I was there. I lived it with her.

I knew it as I rode away from her, as I stormed into the temple of the Fates, as I set their loom aflame, as the world fell apart.

It was a part of that other life, the one Alti had shown us, the one to which we have now returned.

But I couldn't have been there. I was a child living in my father's house the first time Caesar crucified Xena.

Suddenly I remember a strange conversation we had in the wee hours one morning a few years ago. A conversation about a woman Xena knew but didn't know. A memory I had but couldn't have had.

Maybe it's because I destroyed the loom, I don't know, but suddenly I understand. Suddenly I remember. Not only the other life we were just living in Rome. Not only that years-old conversation or the moments it was about or even how I could have experienced Xena's first crucifixion, but everything, all of it.

She must have felt my body tense because one of her hands moves to mine where they are clasped over her stomach. Her thumb strokes me and I feel the question.

"I'm okay," I assure her.

"Now I know that everything happens precisely as it should," she said. "_Precisely_."

"Xena!" I blurt.

She quickly shifts in the saddle enough to face me. Her eyes are full of concern. "What is it?"

"Do you remember . . .?" That conversation in the dungeon, that other life; _two_ lives, two separate mortal lives; two choices, yours and mine. It's too big a question.

Her hand tightens on mine. "I remember everything," she says, eyes peering into me, and I understand that she really does remember _everything_. "Some side effect of what Alti did to us, I figure."

I'm not interested in the why or how right now. I can barely accept what I suddenly know. I quip weakly, "Everything happens precisely as it should?"

Her lips quirk. A tiny smile. She straightens out of her awkward position, faces front again, but leans back into me. "Precisely," she says firmly, with an immense satisfaction that makes me smile.

But suddenly there's a question I'm dying to ask, as if it's been burning in my mind for days or weeks. Since the dungeon, I guess—or rather it would have been since then if I'd been me then. I bite my lip for a moment, hesitating, but then I go ahead and say it.

"Does that mean you've forgiven Caesar for betraying you, having you crucified?" I ask it as gently as I can, knowing the depth of the old wounds whose bandages I'm peeling back with the mention of that name—they deserve delicacy even if this recent experience has already ripped those wounds wide open and thrown in some salt.

For once, however, she doesn't stiffen at his name. Instead she answers with slow thoughtfulness. "No. No, I wouldn't say I've forgiven him. But I accept what happened—then and later. If it's what it took to bring me to you, then I can be the destroyer of nations. I can live with that."

I tighten my arms around her middle and rest my chin on her shoulder. "You're not the destroyer of nations."

I can feel her shrug inside the cocoon I've made for her of my body. "I can live with having _been_ her," she corrects, and I know she thinks it's an irrelevant distinction, know that it's one she's making just to satisfy me.

"Of course. Of course you can," I say, something in me tight and afraid at the implication that once maybe she felt she couldn't, at the thought of losing her, even if the possibility was quashed in the moment it was raised. "It hurts you, I know, but you carry it."

"Relax," she says as she half-turns to me and curls her hand around the back of my head. She knows exactly what I'm not saying, like usual. "It's okay." She urges me into a comforting kiss.

I kiss her like I'm afraid it's going to be the last one, but gradually, the fear drains away. She's here and she's not going anywhere.

"I only meant," she says when her mouth is free again, shifting to face front, "that I hate myself a little less for it now, for all the things I did."

"Oh Xena." I'm too overcome with compassion for her to say any more.

"No, it's all right, Gabrielle," she says, knowing my heart as well as she knows my thoughts. "Really. It's better now. The things I did, they were terrible, but if that's the path that brought me to you, I'd walk it again. Then, I did what I did without considering how wrong it was, without knowing or caring how much I'd one day regret what I was doing. Now, I know. I carry it, like you said, and still, knowing what it is to carry, I'd choose the same path to eventually end up here with you."

My chest swells; I think my heart might burst. It's terrible and it's beautiful, what she's just said. Terrible and beautiful, just like love. I can't say anything at all now. My throat is swollen shut.

Then I feel her tense in the second before she speaks again, and I know why. "Maybe it sounds pretty damn awful to you, knowing all the suffering I caused, to hear I'd do it all again, just the same, to be with you," she says. "But you _do_ know and you also know how much I hate what I did, how much it weighs on me, and well, I just wanted you to _also_ know that you—loving you, being loved by you, being with you . . . I'd rather live with all the horrors in the world on my soul than not have that . . ."

She turns to look at me, to gauge my reaction. "Gabrielle?"

I answer by putting my mouth to hers again.

As we kiss, she shifts forward in the saddle so she can lean back against me and turn her face up to mine, turn her mouth up for my kisses. Appreciating this new position, I lay one hand against her cheek, fingertips just brushing the hair at her temple, to hold her precious face. As the kiss goes on, my other hand begins to stroke her belly through her leathers.

Finally, I can whisper, "It moves me beyond words to know you'd take on all that pain you carry just to be with me, that you love me that much." I nuzzle my face against hers. My tears fall on her cheeks.

"Beyond words, huh?" she says when I finally straighten up, sniffing. "That's something."

I sniff again as I laugh. Her laugh mingles with mine. There's a giddy relief in both, but it's riding on the crest of fiercer emotions.

I put my mouth to her ear. I trace the delicate curves with my tongue, slowly exhaling hot, moist air into her ear on every breath. "I destroyed the world for you, remember?" I murmur between licks.

"I remember," she whispers. Her breathing has gone ragged.

"It doesn't shock me that you'd crush it under your heel for me."

"I wouldn't say I ever had the world under my heel," she manages. "Not the whole world."

"Almost," I tease, my mouth still close to her ear. Who knew six years ago that one day I could tease her about this, that the wounds would ever heal that much?

"And for me, you would. Wouldn't you?" I demand, punctuating the words by squeezing the body under my hands. She draws in her breath sharply through her teeth. "To get to me, you'd crush the world under the heels of your boots and hold your sword to its throat. The whole world."

"I'd slit its throat," she grates. "All their throats, every single one. To get to you. The whole world." Her hands plunge into my hair and pull my head down, pull me into a fierce kiss.

"For you. Every single one. The whole world," I promise between kisses, our lips never really losing contact. She hums in the back of her throat and kisses me with even more ardor.

Long moments later, she tears her mouth away and rests her head on my chest. Her rapid breaths lift the hair around my face as I look down at her. "I know," she says. "I knew that already. Long before the loom."

I flash on her crumpled face, her broken body, hear her scream ring in my ears. "_Noooo!" _There's a blade in my hand, blood on my hands, the hands with which I had sworn to do no violence, bodies scattered around me. Because she is hurt. Because she is down. Because they dared.

I swallow and tighten my arms around her. "It used to hurt you, knowing that."

She kisses my throat, lightly, without the fervor of a moment ago, and her hand strokes my arm. Comfort. Reassurance. "It doesn't now."

_I_ already know _that_ to be true; if I didn't, I wouldn't be so easy in this conversation. "No?" I say anyway, wanting to hear it all.

She shakes her head; it rolls along my collar bone. "I used to think it was because of me. That I had brought you to that, that I had taken you from your true path and delivered you to a life of violence and death. Now. . ."

"Now?" I wonder if she won't say it, after all, if she doesn't dare, even now, and feel a little sad.

"Now I think that you have walked the path you were always meant to walk, just as I have. We were meant to walk the same path. I just got an earlier start and lost my way for a while. 'Til I met you."

She said it. How far we have come. I knew she had come to see that, in her heart of hearts, but I wasn't sure she was comfortable with it.

"I go where Xena goes," I whisper, quoting a much younger me who didn't know her path as I know it but still knew that much, and Xena takes my hands into hers. "But hey, you had already found your way when we met."

Her head shakes again. "You are my way. You know that." She too is quoting a younger self. "Now," she begins, then pauses. "Now, knowing that. . . . For me . . . the whole world . . ." She waves a hand as if gesturing to the vow I've just made.

"Knowing that, what?"

In reply, she places my hands just beneath her breasts and draws them up and down her belly, and I understand from the way she touches me, the way she makes my hands touch _her_, what she means. After all, it's not as if I missed her reaction when I said I'd wreak equal havoc on the world to get to her. It's not as if I didn't say it, in part, to cause that very reaction.

She must know she's already told me without words but she answers anyway. "Knowing that . . . Hearing you say it . . ." she amends, "I was completely ready for you, just like that. I wanted you to claim me, make me yours."

"You _are_ mine," I manage, lowering my mouth to her ear again, though her words have made me light-headed. "You're already mine." I take her earlobe between my teeth as if to prove it and am rewarded with the sound of her breath rushing out all at once over parted lips.

"Yes," she agrees. "Touch me." Her hands slide mine down her stomach to her thighs and back up, languorously, without the urgency of a few moments ago. "I just want to feel you close. What I said before, well, I just wanted you to know that, know what it does to me to know you love me so fiercely. I wanted you to know how far we are from the days when it hurt to see you fight for me because I know it hurt you that it bothered me. " Our hands bump into her armor and she stops their motion. "But the . . . the way I responded, that's not why I want you to touch me now."

I move our hands now, back down the same path she just took, her hands now only resting on mine, no longer guiding. That was a lot of explanation for a request I had found uncomplicated to begin with, so I give it some thought as my hands roam down and up again. I don't stop when I reach the armor as she did but continue up until I find the bare skin of her chest, the swells of her breasts. She lets her hands fall away. "You're not ready for me anymore?" I finally ask, not bothered by the idea, just curious.

"I didn't say _that_," she murmurs.

I brush her hair aside and stroke the expanse of her chest, eventually dipping the fingers of one hand into her cleavage, beneath the leather. I can move my fingers just enough to make tiny strokes of soft skin. I move my other hand back down to her stomach, cuddling her.

"I just want you to know," she says, "that even if you hadn't just gotten me ridiculously hot, I'd still want you to touch me. I wanted you to before that. Since I saw you there on the road. Since I found myself back here in the first place. I just wanted to find you and—"

Of course she did; I know that. And of course I did, too. That's why I'm up here behind her on Argo now as we ride away from Rome, whatever the direction we may actually be heading.

"I love you, too, Xena." I have the goofiest smile on my face. I take my fingers out of her bodice and lay my hand over chest and armor—where I know her heart to be. "And that was quite possibly the silliest conversation we've ever had. Did you really think you needed to explain to me at this point that you want me to touch you because you're in love with me, not just because you want to scratch an itch?"

She's silent for a long moment and I start to wonder if I've hurt her feelings, calling her silly when she was so earnest. I'm marshaling an apology when she says, "Sillier than the one about whether that one group of stars looks like a dipper or a bear?"

Surprised, I burst out laughing.

"How about the one about how fish are just people waiting for the right motivation to grow legs?"

"No, you're right. Not sillier than either of those." I lean down and kiss her smiling mouth.

Her hands slide into my hair. I can tell by the way she kisses that she's way past ready for me, and I'm more than ready to take what she's offering. We're home but I need us to be together like this before I'll really feel we're back where we belong: _together_.

My hand rubs the bare skin of her chest needfully and then moves down to cover her breast. Of course, what it really covers is the beaten brass of her armor, but I have my ways.

I slide my hand back to the top of her leathers and begin to work my fingers beneath them. She shifts in the saddle, eager for my touch, and I'm glad this Argo is as patient with us as the first Argo. It's a tight squeeze and the armor digs into the back of my hand, but I work my fingers down to where I want them.

Our mouths part and she rises up into my touch, wrapping her left arm around my back, and the sight of her sprawled in my lap, back arched, wanting and wanton, the feel of other her hand tightening in my hair as it does now, pierces me like a flaming arrow ripping through me.

She brings the hand in my hair down to mine where it rests on her stomach and then presses my hand into her body, her fingers rubbing at my skin. I slip my hand from beneath hers and slide it a little lower down her belly while I work my left hand out of her bodice and then into its other side. Watching her face, I see her bite her lip as she waits for my hand to reach its goal, and when it does, her eyes flutter closed and her head falls farther back against my shoulder, neck arching.

She licks her lips before she speaks, her eyes still closed. "Was this worth it, Gabrielle? Was it worth giving up heaven to touch me like this?"

My heart leaps into my throat at the shock of remembering everything we now know, of hearing it spoken of. "So you do remember." She'd told me as much; I just don't have anything better to say in that moment of shock.

"I told you—everything."

I put my mouth to her ear again. "It wasn't heaven I gave up. It was much better than heaven." And it was. Complete union with her. "But you weren't really aware of it. You couldn't feel me like I felt you. "You sensed my presence sometimes, in some dim way, beneath conscious thought, but you couldn't hear my voice. You couldn't see me. You couldn't _feel_ me." As I speak, my right hand encounters hardened leather strips and then the softness of muslin. "We were one, but what good was being one if you still felt alone?"

"But was it worth it, just for this?" She presses into my hand.

"Just for this? Just to touch you like this?" My fingers inside muslin, now; my touch clarifying my words. And what I feel here . . . She is a never-ending delight to my senses. "Just for you to know I'm there and that you're complete? To have met you at last and found that I'm complete? To walk beside you every day and share your burdens, to have you share mine, to hold you, to be held, to look into your eyes and have you _see_ me, to see the love in your eyes when you look at me, to feel it in your touch, to know each other's thoughts without speaking—to have your back and occasionally save your ass? Oh yeah, it was worth it. Just for this, it was worth giving up more than heaven."

"Gabri," she whispers as her hand clenches on my forearm—just that, the way she does when she's too overcome with love or passion to manage the last syllable and my name breaks in her mouth, the way that always undoes me.

"It was worth it just to hear you say my name like that," I tell her.

With a groan, she turns her head, seeking me, reaching up to push her free hand into my hair again and urge me back down, and I lower my mouth to hers. We kiss even as she moves her arm from around me and puts her hand on my hand, under her skirt, even as she redirects my fingers and then strokes tiny, frantic patterns on the back of my hand . . . even as . . . even as . . . . Even then, our mouths don't part, though neither of us has the focus to actually continue kissing. Tongues touch, run over lips, lips press. We breathe together, into each other. Then her mouth slips away from mine as she arches her neck, pushing her head back, hard against my shoulder. I press the side of my mouth against her temple as . . . as . . .

I love that long low sound, the one that seems torn out of her throat.

Her hand drops away from mine and I withdraw my fingers and . . .

I let my hand rest lightly on warm muslin, protectively, holding her, loving her, just because I can. Because she is mine. Because I'm hers.

My other arm is around her stomach again, has been for some time, but now my hold loosens to a light embrace.

And she turns her face into my neck and kisses me messily there, making small contented sounds as she does so, and I lean down to kiss her dark hair.

"Love you," she murmurs.

"Love you too."

After a few more minutes of mutual nuzzling, she straightens in the saddle, saying, "I need you off this horse."

Argo snorts.

"No offense," Xena tells her and pats her neck. "Thanks for getting us here, girl." It's deserved praise because Argo has been the only one of the three of us who was actually aware of our surroundings.

Now, for the first time, Xena actually pays attention to where Argo is heading, and soon, with that unerring knack she has, she has guided us to a small clearing in the trees a short distance off Argo's path.

She helps me dismount, and when my feet touch the ground, I move my hands from her shoulders to her hips and put my arms around her waist. She hugs me in turn and we lean into each other.

"It's been a lifetime since I held you like this," she murmurs into my hair.

"More like two," I quip.

She acknowledges my joke with a hint of a smile, her mood too intense to allow much room for such a fleeting emotion as amusement.

We have been together for . . . forever, after all. For a thousand thousand mortal lifetimes. Maybe more. How long is eternity?

However long it is, I see all the length and breadth and depth of it in Xena's eyes. I see an eternity of love.

"This is all I wanted in that dungeon when I was waiting for the guards to come for me," she says, pressing us together more fiercely. "And then you were there."

_Oh Xena. _It pierces my heart now to think that I didn't hug her then. How could I not have hugged her one last time?

Oh yeah. I didn't dare, even knowing what I knew of our real life together in an independent Greece, because she was the empress, the most powerful woman in the world, and I was a provincial playwright. Still, I should have hugged her. And anyway, she's pretty much always been the most powerful woman in the world, one way or another, right?

I tighten my arms around her now, as if I can make up for not having held her before she died for me in another life. "I'm sorry I didn't do this then."

"No!" she protests. She pulls away enough to see my face but not enough to loosen our embrace. "You came. It doesn't matter how you touched me or what you said. You came back for me. You loved me. Even then, when we'd barely met." She lifts her hands to my face and brushes away the hair on my brow, then holds my face as I'd held hers, reminding me.

I smile up at her as she had smiled up at me then, and just as tearfully, though for different reasons. "I'll love you forever," I tell her.

"I know you will," she says intently, staring into my eyes. "I count on it.

"And you have, haven't you?" she adds slowly, after a moment, wonderingly. "We have. Forever."

I give her a little nod.

We make camp. Because that is what we do; we travel and then we stop, and when we stop, we make camp.

Tonight's camp is only a fire and our furs beside it; by silent mutual consent, we don't bother with the things for cooking or for our other routine chores.

As I work, I am thinking about the dungeon again and about that desperate ride in the rain to the temple while Xena was dying. I didn't have a plan. I knew where I was going—not Greece, not my vineyard, as she'd wanted, but to the nearest temple of the Fates—but it was rage that drove me, not purpose. A seething fury that the _choice_ I had made had been twisted, that Xena and I had had to wait those extra years to find each other, that she had been so long without me, and all because of Caesar, he whose betrayal had been the last betrayal she could bear, a betrayal the pain of which had once driven me to choose _again_—and he had taken that choice from me. He had taken her from me. He had bound her to _him_, and even once we had finally found each other—because of me, _for_ me—she would have stayed with him, to keep me safe. Only even _that_ wasn't enough for him. He had kept her from me for years, and now he had effectively kept us apart _for our whole lives_—because now she was dying.

He had tampered with the loom of the Fates, their absurd avatar of the lives of man, and his tampering had destroyed what was meant to be, what we had _chosen_, our destiny.

As the loom burned, as I felt myself dying, felt Xena dying, I had known only that my choice, her choice, our destiny, had been stolen from us because the foolish Fates, mere manifestations of belief themselves, had carelessly made the lives of men into shiny little golden threads that a clever bastard like Caesar could manipulate.

And then the world ended and I was in the world; I was the Gabrielle I had always been, the one I had remembered in a meadow outside Rome when I was the playwright, but now I had always been me.

I didn't know where I was but I knew that Xena was already coming for me. That she had been here first, as she was always first in the world, as if the world had been put back together in order, just as it had been destroyed piece by piece as the threads on the loom burned.

And then I heard the thunder of galloping hooves and Xena rode into sight, her urgency clear in Argo's pace, and the world was complete.

Now Xena rises from crouching near the fire she has lit and takes off her armor as I finishing spreading the blankets, and then there is nothing else to do.

We settle onto the furs, facing each other.

Eventually Xena says, "Hey, you remember that time—it was kinda like we'd had the same dream, only I was sure that it was real, and I remembered you being there with me when I was hurt—

"But I couldn't have been there because I wasn't—yeah. I was thinking about that earlier."

She nods. "Only, turns out, you _were_ there," she says.

We are quiet for a long moment, thinking about the implications.

For my part, I sense that I now have memories stretching back farther than I can comprehend, memories that go back to a time even _before time,_ that they are mostly memories of one long unbroken, timeless existence. I can feel them there, at the edge of my thoughts, and I sense that the right trigger could evoke any one of them as easily as the smell of nutbread evokes childhood and my mother's kitchen, that if my mortal mind had the capacity, I could even remember them all—_know_ them all, _live_ them all—all at once, simultaneously.

"We were . . . we were the same . . . the same soul," Xena says now. "Gods, it's like that story you tell about when people had four arms and four legs and two heads but got split in half 'cause Zeus was jealous!"

I laugh at the realization. "I guess there was a reason I always liked that idea so much. It really _was_ like that, except—"

"Except we didn't bother with bodies 'til we chose mortality," she finishes, making me chuckle at the synchronicity of our thoughts.

We happily snuggle our mortal bodies together, delighting in the feel of each other.

"That day on Mount Nestos, you chose _again_," she says momentarily_._

I nod and explain. "I realized the bond we had was . . . too one-sided. I felt everything you felt, but your . . . your side of it had closed down as you had grown up and you couldn't feel the connection any more. You . . ." _needed to feel it . . ._ "I wanted you to feel it."

"You knew I needed it," she says and I smile, caught, and give a little nod. Both are true. And more yet.

"But so did I. I _needed_ to connect with you in all the ways you could connect with other people, all the ways I had never known. I . . . I needed to hold you and . . ." I kiss her, slowly, wanting to fully experience every single sensation of it.

Long minutes later, we lay we our cheeks together, gently shifting to brush skin against skin. "This," I murmur. "I needed all this."

"Yes," she agrees. "This. Being back with you, having you in my arms, it's all I wanted when I found myself in these woods earlier and not dead like I'd expected. The need for it . . . it drove me to you. I didn't know where I was going, but I had to get to you, so I just rode as hard as I could . . . I couldn't stop thinking about the last time I saw you. Before, I mean. In Rome. The dungeon."

"Me either."

"It broke my heart when they took me away from you, then. Just when we'd found each other again."

"Broke mine too," I mumble. Abruptly, I push myself up on one arm. "If I'd been me and not the playwright—"

Her fingers brush across my lips. "I know."

I am soothed enough to sink back into her embrace but not entirely soothed. "I'd never have let them just take you from me," I fume.

"Sweetheart," she says, gathering me closer so we are pressed chest to chest, our faces in each other's necks. All her love in that one word—and the reassurance that she knows I'd fight for her. That endearment she never uses deliberately—nor casually—but only when her feelings overflow and her heart floods out over her lips.

Her hands tighten. "But in the end, it would have only meant another cross for you. I'm glad you didn't fight them."

She's right and it only makes me more agitated. I should have been with her. I should have died beside her. I pull back to look at her. "Xena—"

"No," she interrupts, pointing a finger at me for emphasis. "No. In this life, you're my warrior, and I love that. I love fighting beside you. I love knowing you've got my back. I love that you'd give your life to protect me." Her hand finds my shoulder, clenches. "But I hate it too. We went to the cross together, once. I heard your screams as they drove the nails into you. I couldn't stand the thought of that happening again. I _can't_ stand it. I know if it comes down to it, you'll die for me, but just let me be glad that in that life, it didn't happen. It didn't happen, and you saved us, and here we are. Together."

"Everything happens precisely as it should?" I repeat again, bitterly this time. I can't seem to get those words off my mind.

She strokes my cheek, gently, the other hand, the one on my shoulder, gentle now too. "Everything."

I don't know how she can say that, with everything that's happened to us, to _her_. With all the regret she lives with. How she could say it even before we remembered the rest of it. She knows what I'm thinking.

"We're together, aren't we?"

I consider that for a moment. Is that enough for her? How can it be?

As if she has heard my very thought, she edges her face closer to mine until we are nose to nose and reminds me, "The whole world, Gabrielle. To get to you, the whole world."

"The whole world," I repeat, speaking my own heart against her lips.

Yes. It is enough.

_**-x-  
Fini  
-x-**_

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